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Fractals in the Sun's storms

Plasma astrophysicists at the University of Warwick have found that key information about the Sun's "storm season" is being broadcast across the solar system in a fractal snapshot imprinted in the solar wind. This research opens up new ways of looking at both space weather and the unstable behaviour that affects the operation of fusion powered power plants.

Solar wind consists of a stream of plasma, mainly protons and electrons, that are ejected by the Sun's corona. On its way out the wind interacts with the Sun's magnetic field, broadcasting it across the universe. The researchers, led by Sandra Chapman, measured the strength of the magnetic field in the solar wind. They found that when the Sun is at the peak of its 11-year cycle, the graph they
were plotting turned into a fractal. At this point the solar corona was at its most active, stormy and complex, due to sunspot activity, solar flares, etc. When the corona was quieter no fractal patterns were found in the solar wind.

This new information will help astrophysicists understand how the solar corona heats the solar wind and the nature of the turbulence of the solar wind with its implications for cosmic ray flux and space weather.

The techniques used to find and understand the fractal patterns in the solar wind are also being used to assist the quest for fusion power. Researchers in the University of Warwick's Centre for Fusion, Space and Astrophysics (CFSA) are collaborating with scientists from the EURATOM/UKAEA fusion research programme to measure and understand fluctuations in the world leading fusion experiment
MAST (the Mega Amp Spherical Tokamak) at Culham. Controlling plasma fluctuations in tokamaks is important for getting the best performance out of future fusion power plants.

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Browse with Plus - The world's largest experiment

Scientists are currently building the largest machine in the world in order to understand the smallest fragments of our universe. Their insights will throw light on some of the biggest questions there are - how did the universe start, what is it made of, and how will it end? The machine is the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and it is buried up to 175m below ground in a huge circular tunnel close
to Geneva. To prepare for its inauguration at the end of this year, the Science Museum has put on a special exhibition entitled "Big Bang". The accompanying website tells you all you need to know about the collider and the science behind it. It's accessible for everyone from school age onwards, no previous knowledge required.

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Live maths - tangled DNA, the Big Bang and musical superstrings

Twisting, Coiling, Knotting: Maths and DNA Replication

The proportions of a DNA molecule in a human cell are equivalent to a 2000-mile-long rope packed inside the Millennium Dome. When DNA replicates, it spins at an astonishing 10 turns per second. Therefore, it is hardly surprising that DNA can become highly twisted, super-coiled and even knotted! To understand this phenomenon, the molecular biologist must grapple with the mathematical concepts
of twisting, writhing and knotting. In this highly-illustrated talk Professor Michael Thompson FRS will experiment with strings and rubber bands (bring your own!) to explore the geometrical rules which underlie the transmission our genetic code.

Dinner@Dana: Back to the Big Bang

In honour of the Large Hadron Collider, the Dana Centre is holding an evening dinner and discussion attended by the expert James Gillies from CERN. There'll be slide shows and photographs and a two-course meal inspired by particle physics.

When: 15th of May 2007, 6.30pm - 8.30pm
Where: Dana Centre, 165 Queen's Gate, London SW7 5HE
Tickets: £15 per person, including a two-course meal and a drink. Tickets have to be booked by calling 0207942 4040 or e-mailing tickets@danacentre.org.uk.
Age range: this event is open only to those over 18 years of age.
More information: Visit the Dana Centre site.

Also the Science Museum in London has put on an exhibition in honour of the Large Hadron Collider. The exhibition is free and will run until the 7th of October 2007.

Superstrings - a Musical Journey through Time and Space

You probably knew that Einstein was a great scientist, but did you also know that he played the violin? In this unique double act a virtuoso violinist and the head of the department of particle physics at Oxford University combine the electricity of a live musical performance with an insight into the deepest corners of the Universe. The lecture explores Einstein's life, both in science and in
music, from his theories that shaped space and time, to modern ideas in particle physics.

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Mathematical moment - Henry Whitehead

Born: 11th of November 1904 in Madras, India
Died: 8th of May 1960 in Princeton, New Jersey, USA

"He would have been more successful in mathematics if he had been less so at cricket," is what Whitehead's maths teacher wrote about him on his graduation from Eton. Once at Oxford, to which he'd nevertheless gained entry, Whitehead's distraction diversified to include squash, tennis, boxing and poker, at which he reportedly staked large sums of money. Worse, Whitehead did not even seem to
want to become a mathematician at first, instead he joined a stockbrokers firm in London on completion of his degree.

But luckily, all turned out well for maths in the end. Working in the City wasn't to Whitehead's taste, and after a detour to Oxford he enrolled for a PhD at Princeton in the US. Here he began to work on two areas which benefitted greatly from his contributions: topology and differential geometry. Both differential geometry and topology deal with surfaces like the sphere or the torus, or their
higher dimensional analogues. While differential geometry looks at rigid properties that depend on a metric, for example the curvature of a surface, in topology metric properties are irrelevant. Topologists regard two objects as being the same if you can deform one into the other without tearing. The famous example is that a coffee cup and a doughnut are topologically the same.

Whitehead contributed two major works to differential geometry, now considered classics. In topology he is best remembered for his work on "homotopy equivalence", a central notion when it comes to pinning down whether two objects are topologically equivalent. Notably, Whitehead spent quite some time working on the now famous Poincare conjecture and even thought that he had found a proof.
However, an inconspicuous pair of interlinked circles, now known as the "Whitehead link", gave rise to a structure that Whitehead had assumed not to exist. This toppled his proof and the Poincare conjecture was to remain open for another 70 years.

Whitehead also contributed to maths in another, less theoretical way. The percecution of Jews in Nazi Germany troubled him greatly, and he helped a number of eminent mathematicians to escape, including Erwin Schroedinger, one of the founders of quantum mechanics.

Had Whitehead not died suddenly of a heart attack at only 56, he certainly would have gone on to contribute even more.

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Mathematical form

In the Imaging maths series Plus explored how to visualise, transform and unfold strange geometric objects like the Klein bottle or the Möbius strip. Now Plus has come across a British artist who does just that, but without the aid of computers. John Pickering bases his work on one simple mathematical
transformation, the inversion in a circle. His works are beautifully intricate 3D objects made up of 2D slices, with each slice and its relationship to the others worked out using honest and rigorous co-ordinate geometry.

Unfortunately, Pickering's work can't be seen on the web, so if you're interested in mathematical art, keep an eye out for one of his exhibitions. Alternatively, there is a book on Pickering's art called Mathematical form: John Pickering and the architecture of the inversion principle, published by the Architectural Association.

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Happy birthday, Leonhard Euler!

Leonhard Euler, born on the 15th of April 1707 in Basel, Switzerland, would have turned 300 yesterday! In the current issue Plus kicks of a celebratory series of articles with Robin Wilson's "Read Euler, read Euler, he is the master of us all.". Here is a taster of Wilson's article.

Euler was the most prolific mathematician of all time. He wrote more than 500 books and papers during his lifetime — about 800 pages per year — with an incredible 400 further publications appearing posthumously. His collected works and correspondence are still not completely published: they already fill over seventy large volumes, comprising tens of thousands of pages.

Euler worked in an astonishing variety of areas, ranging from the very pure — the theory of numbers, the geometry of a circle and musical harmony — via such areas as infinite series, logarithms, the calculus and mechanics, to the practical — optics, astronomy, the motion of the Moon, the sailing of ships, and much else besides. Indeed, Euler originated so many ideas that his successors have
been kept busy trying to follow them up ever since. Not surprisingly, many concepts are named after him: Euler's constant, Euler's polyhedron formula, the Euler line of a triangle, Euler's equations of motion, Eulerian graphs, Euler's pentagonal formula for partitions, and many others.

Euler's career took him from his native Basel to the Academy at St Petersburg, where he eventually became Professor of Mathematics, to the Berlin Academy, on invitation from Prussia's Frederick the Great, and finally back to St Petersburg. He fathered thirteen children, of whom only five survived to adolescence, and reportedly carried out mathematical researches with a baby on his lap.

He died in St Petersburg on the 18th of September 1783. In a eulogy by the Marquis de Condorcet, we read about his final afternoon:

On the 7th of September 1783, after amusing himself with calculating on a slate the laws of the ascending motion of air balloons, the recent discovery of which was then making a noise all over Europe, he dined with Mr Lexell and his family, talked of Herschel's planet (Uranus), and of the calculations which determine its orbit. A little after, he called his grandchild, and fell a playing
with him as he drank tea, when suddenly the pipe, which he held in his hand, dropped from it, and he ceased to calculate and to breathe.